Mexico’s oil and natural gas fields are so near but yet so far from the United States, where the hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling revolution have turned it into a global behemoth. Now Mexico stands poised as an unconventional threat as well.

The Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas, in the cradle of the unconventional fields, extends into the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. But while the small companies that were the guerrilla fighters of the revolution continue to buzz the formation in Texas with drilling activity, the Tamaulipas side is eerily silent.Mexico’s state oil company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) drilled about 20 wells a few years ago, but without apparently being unable to master the fracking/horizontal drilling technology.

This time round, with the instruments of the 2013-14 energy reform under their belt, the Mexican energy authorities have announced the nation’s first upstream auction of unconventional resources in the wake of a government-sponsored forum in the border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas.

Avant Energy is planning to build a logistics system that will supply refined products to Mexico’s Bajio region via rail from the Port of Altamira in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, the company said Wednesday.

The network will be known as Supera and it will be built along with strategic partners Savage Services and Kansas City Southern (KCS), Avant said in a statement.

Avant was not immediately available for comment. The company already has all the port facilities and regulatory permits required for construction.

The system will be anchored by a 1.2-million-barrel marine import terminal at the port of Altamira, which will be able to unload Panamax vessels.

Mexico’s 2013 energy reforms are based on bringing in more competition for the two state-owned monopolies that had become too stagnant, Pemex (oil and gas) and CFE (electricity). One of the key areas with huge upside for foreign firms is the very expensive process of natural gas storage, which is critical for Mexico as it moves to replace overused fuel oil and reduce GHG emissions to meet climate change goals.

Despite rapidly declining production, Mexico is one of the most natural gas dependent nations on Earth. Gas now supplies 45 percent of all energy and 60 percent of electricity. Mexico has been forced to increasingly depend on cheaper piped imports from the U.S., which at 4.5 Bcf/d now account for about 55 percent of Mexico’s total gas usage. Much more gas will be required. Per capita, Mexico’s 130 million citizens consume just a third of the electricity that other OECD nations do. Additionally, there is a manufacturing boom in Mexico, namely in the automotive industry that will use increasing amounts of natural gas.

Mexico is trying to lure as much oil investment as possible before the president who overhauled the country’s energy industry leaves.

By the end of the summer, the country that until recently had a state monopoly on crude will have offered more than 100 permits to oil majors like Exxon Mobil Corp. in three auctions this year. The last bidding round, announced on Wednesday, will cover an area bigger than Delaware.

The pace of sales is unprecedented as the country prepares to say goodbye to the presidency of Enrique Pena Nieto, who oversaw a complete makeover of the country’s energy laws to lure foreign investment into everything from oil fields to pipelines to refineries.

An election in July could alter the course of the enormous transformation as Mexicans choose who will succeed Pena Nieto in December, with a candidate that has pledged to review the energy reforms leading the polls.

For now, oil giants including Exxon, BP Plc and Chevron Corp. are set to invest tens of billions of dollars in the country after winning exploration and production licenses in previous auctions. And they are lining up to bid for more.

“The rounds transcend the electoral cycles,” Energy Minister Pedro Joaquin Coldwell said today at the presentation of the onshore auction plans in Mexico City. The oil auctions “exclusively comply with the energy policy that Mexico demands and will continue to demand in the future.”

San Antonio-based refining company Valero Energy Corp. has signed a lucrative deal that will allow it to supply gasoline, diesel and jet fuel to thousands of new customers south of the border in Veracruz, Puebla and Mexico City.Officials with Valero (NYSE: VLO) confirmed that the company’s Mexican subsidiary, Valero Marketing and Supply de México SA de CV, has entered into a long-term import agreement with Mexico City-based Infraestructura Energetica Nova SAB de CV.

Mexico held back-to-back licensing rounds on 12 July 2017 as part of the President Enrique Peña Nieto administration’s goal to lure private investment to the Latin American nation’s upstream.To use an American baseball analogy, Mexico knocked it out of the park each time and now Mexican oil and gas is gaining momentum.The duo-round system on 12 July encompassed a total of 24 blocks. By the end of the day, 21 blocks had been awarded.

Mexico will delay its next offshore oilfield auctions by a month, giving international bidders more time to evaluate recent major crude discoveries that highlight the potential value of the assets.A new billion-barrel find announced last week “confirms that the Mexican side of the Gulf of Mexico is very prolific,” said Juan Carlos Zepeda, Mexico’s chief oil regulator in an interview Friday. “International and national interest is awakening.”July 12 marked perhaps the single most successful day for the Mexico oil industry since the government ended Petroleos Mexicanos’s government-owned production monopoly in 2014. Premier Oil Plc, Sierra Oil & Gas and Talos Energy LLC reported a reservoir with an estimated 1.4 billion to 2 billion barrels of oil in the southern Gulf of Mexico. On the same day, Italian producer Eni Spa said its March find in Mexico’s offshore waters also contains the equivalent of as much as 1 billion barrels, and Mexico successfully auctioned 21 of 24 onshore fields to private companies.

A consortium of Premier Oil Plc, Sierra Oil & Gas S de RL de CV and Talos Energy LLC made the discovery in the shallow waters of the southern Gulf of Mexico just two years after winning the exploration license. It’s the first new find by a private company in the country in almost 80 years, according to consultant Wood Mackenzie Ltd., possible only after the government ended the monopoly of state-run Petroleos Mexicanos.The Zama discovery “is the most important achievement so far of Mexico’s energy reform,” Pablo Medina, the senior upstream analyst for Latin America at Wood Mackenzie, said by email. “It is one of the 15 largest shallow-water fields discovered globally in the past 20 years.”